Cloudless Web Apps with CouchDB

I've been working with CouchDB for a few years now. These past few weeks I've configured my web apps to use CouchDB installed on my desktop pc. I really don't know why I hadn't done this earlier because it turned out to be incredibly easy and it provides some very impressive features.

I made a simple demo app that demonstrates how to create web apps using CouchDB as a backend on the client side. I posted some instructions on how to get and use it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CouchDB/.

I'd love to hear what others think about this approach.

Bill Stephenson

posted to

Learning to Code

on May 23, 2020

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1

Curious, why specifically CouchDB?

horizontech

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4 years ago
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  CouchDB is easy for anyone to install. It has a built-in web server that PouchDB.js can easily connect to it. PouchDB.js makes it really easy to use CouchDB, so that's no small part of why.
  
  Honestly, I was surprised at how easy it is to use CouchDB as a client side back end. And again at how fast apps run with it used this way. I expect it's about as close to a native app as a web app can get right now.
  
  There may be ways of doing this with SQL DBs but I'm not aware them. I'd certainly look into them if there are.
  
  Did you get a chance to play with it?
  
  oblib
  
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  4 years ago
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    Thanks for the response.
    
    I haven't used CouchDB. (Probably should) When you mean client-side back end, something like firebase?
    
    (Honestly, most for personal projects I use firebase. At work, we use Postgres, and Mongo)
    
    horizontech
    
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    4 years ago
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      I think you might like using PouchDB/CouchDB for personal projects. You don't need a web server or even a web connection to develop apps that use CouchDB installed on your PC and it's only one line of code (a url) you need to edit to point your app at a web based CouchDB.
      
      If you check out the source code for demo pages I made you can see there's not much to it.
      
      This page creates a CouchDB user, and a database for that user, and sets the permissions on the database:
      
      https://cherrypc.com/app/editor/setup.html
      
      This page has a very simple example of authenticating the user, creating, saving, editing, displaying, listing, and deleting rich text documents:
      
      https://cherrypc.com/app/editor/index.html
      
      https://pouchdb.com has great docs and example code.
      
      oblib
      
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      4 years ago
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        Thank you so much.
        
        horizontech
        
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        4 years ago
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